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Friday, February 13, 2015

Thoughts and notes from Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day 2015

The day started with news in PostgreSQL 9.4 presented by Tomáš Vondra, now working for 2ndQuadrant. He talked about improvements in replication, GIN indexes, numeric aggregates, refreshing materialized views, altering system variables directly from daemon, ...

Then, Pavel Stěhule from GoodData gave us a bit more deep review of storing non-structural data within PostgreSQL (from historic implementations to the newest great JSONB new in 9.4). It was quite interesting to see that even traditional relational DB users think seriously about NoSQL solutions like MongoDB. It seems even advocates of those traditional SQL solutions see some advantages of new way to store data (NoSQL concepts).

It was also mentioned that NoSQL is not only understood as not-sql, but more often like not-only-sql and that while relational databases implement features to get closer to NoSQL, NoSQL databases implement features to get a bit closer to traditional SQL solutions (assuming implementing better ACID, reliability, ...)

Vratislav Beneš from OptiSolutions had a talk about unstructured and sensor data, generally about big data challenges. He presented comparison between PostgreSQL 9.4 (with JSONB) and MongoDB for the same type of work with unstructured data. His testing showed there are no big differences in performance, PostgreSQL is however quite better in space utilization (~3 times less data on disk). He closed his talk with a thought that everybody should choose a database carefully, according to a specific use case (e.g. if we care about other NoSQL features like out-of-the-box sharding/replication or we're fine with a bit more heavy-footed, but more reliable SQL solutions).

Aliaksandr Aliashkevich gave quite basic overview about sharding solutions for PostgreSQL, just read his shards.io web for more information, the presentation had basically a similar content.
A similar overview, this time about other open-source tools (dumping, upgrading, partitioning, logical replications) was given by Keith Fiske, actual author of the tools. They are all available under his username on github, so just look there or chech his site keithf4.com for more information.

Marc Balmer from micro systems spoke about securing PostgreSQL application, where he emphasized the need to not limit access only on application level, but also on database level. He didn't omit to give a basic overview about main database vulnerabilities on some specific examples (like SQL injection) but most of the presentation was about ways to secure data within a database from being abused by users that shouldn't have access for them. I think nobody who was there and pays some attention about security will ever use one superuser role to access DB again. Hopefully the slides will be soon at p2d2 site.

Petr Jelínek from 2ndQuadrant talked about a feature, that is heading to PostgreSQL 9.next (not sure yet if 9.5 mades it) -- BDR -- Bi Directional Replication. This basically implements multi-master capabilities and it is already working solution, which is patch-by-patch heading to PostgreSQL upstream. We know upstream is careful about any new feature, so even in this case it goes rather slowly, because upstream needs to be sure it is good for everybody (not only for specific use cases).

Štěpán Bechynský showed Amazon's AWS in practice, especially what are the steps to get a PostgreSQL machine in the cloud (basically PaaS variant). It must have been interesting for anybody who haven't seen how provisioning in cloud works from users' point of view, but for me, as I already saw OpenStack in action, I didn't actually learned much new. I heard from other attendees as well that there were some specific experiences missing -- like performance experiences, what are some specific issues someone new to cloud world experiences, etc.

Since PostgreSQL now supports foreign data wrappers, couple of interesting wrappers are available already. Those add some new functionality to the daemon itself and reminds me MySQL's engine architecture a bit. Jan Holcapek introduced on of those wrappers -- cstore_fwd, which adds columnar storage capabilities to PostgreSQL.

It was interesting to see that even on some non-complicated queries the EXPLAIN command showed several times less IO operations, comparing to native PostgreSQL. For more complicated use cases that may be even better, since going through columns directly for aggregation is much more effective than reading all the rows with most of the data read unnecessarily for the specific query.

Even if this particular foreign data wrapper doesn't support insert/update/delete features, it seemed very promising. It was also interesting when Jan asked audience what column database they use. Since MonetDB was mentioned not only once, it seems to be a good candidate to be packaged into Fedora. Who is volunteering for this?